


Their solitary way

by a_la_grecque



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:41:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21882136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_la_grecque/pseuds/a_la_grecque
Summary: Aziraphale and Crowley have some more intimate moments than they openly acknowledge as they encounter each other through the ages.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12
Collections: Oh Come All Ye Sinful! A Depraved Holiday Exchange 2019





	Their solitary way

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mswhich](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mswhich/gifts).

He can't even remember when they’d first started this thing between them - it was some time between Eden and the Flood, when the world still felt shiny and new but after it had become clear they were both going to be down here for a while. Well, up here in Crowley’s case, he supposed. 

It had all been in the nature of a grand experiment at first, there was an unspoken agreement between them that getting involved with humans was strictly for business (at least, he assumed that was the agreement, but of course by definition he’d never actually discussed it with Crowley). And whatever it was that they were doing, it definitely wasn’t work. 

It actually couldn’t compare to a true spiritual union, the feeling of utter completeness that came from the commingling of angelic essences, but he was captivated by the raw physicality of it. Even if they didn’t know exactly what to do with their hands, or their lips, or anything else really, they’d still managed to come together in the end, overcome by the delicious friction of flesh on sweat-slicked flesh that left them breathless and loosely tangled together, both a little more rattled than they’d care to admit.

***

It didn’t happen all too often to begin with, this thing with the angel. He wasn’t even sure he liked Aziraphale for the first few centuries, but there are certain things that only the two of them can really understand. Once humans got a handle on how to reliably manage the process of fermentation, things got a lot easier between them. It was almost a pleasure to encounter the angel in Rome, a rather less than casual encounter in a caupona that left him waiting for more.

He wasn’t entirely surprised to find out that Aziraphale had secured himself an invitation to the most decadent dinner party in town, even though he could categorically state that no angels could have any business working on the host’s soul. The angel had developed a decided taste for the finer things in life somewhere along the way, and looked utterly at home reclining among all the other dissolute diners, greeting every course with tiny coos of delight. For his part, Crowley chose to eat sparingly and drink deeply, looking at the angel more often than he probably should. Towards the end of the meal their eyes met, and he caught a hint of invitation. 

He learned that Aziraphale had developed a taste for other sorts of sensory pleasures as well, as the dinner party descended into the kind of debauched chaos that Aziraphale should have been horrified by. It was the kind of chaos that Crowley would write up in his next report, taking credit where it wasn’t entirely due and glossing over the fact that he hadn’t exactly noticed too much of what was going on since he’d been rather wrapped up in the angel at the time. Still, according to the whispered accounts in the baths and the obscene grafitti that popped up in the weeks afterwards, it had been quite the affair. He wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or mildly offended that none of it seemed to relate to the two of them.

***

He hadn’t seen Crowley for years, but it couldn’t really have been anyone else in that ridiculous black armour. He was grateful that the demon didn’t choose to press the issue and fight with him, but oddly sorry to see him go. 

It was a distinct pleasure then to encounter Crowley alone a little while later, both of them just happening to be wandering in the woods near Camelot which have yet to take on the misty illusion of myth. 

In fact Aziraphale found out exactly how real and solid they were when Crowley slammed him abruptly against a tree, flipping up his visor to reveal a wild look in his eyes. Aziraphale couldn’t decipher it at first until he heard rather than felt Crowley rutting against his thigh. The scrape and clank of metal against metal brought up an image of something he’d seen a long time ago. Two tortoises, mating in the desert, their shells clashing furiously together. It as too much and he dissolved into laughter. 

Crowley looked angry at this and perhaps just a little… well no, just kind of angry really. He finally managed to stutter out the word “T-t-tortoises!”

He saw the confusion on Crowley’s face followed by swiftly dawning amusement. The demon’s mouth twitched for a second and then he began to laugh as well. It was good to laugh, a truly worldly thing to do. There was joy in heaven, of course, but always tempered with solemnity. This kind of wild mirth was never dreamed of there, and he couldn’t imagine that things would be any different in hell.

The two of them were helpless for several long seconds, collapsed against each other, too incapacitated to simply miracle the armour away. Eventually Crowley stopped his mouth up with a frantic kiss, stifling the laughter and turning it to something altogether more urgent. The barriers between them simply dissolved away, leaving him with the bark of the tree rough against his back and Crowley, hot and hard, pressed to his front. 

When it was over, they laughed again, more gentle this time and suffused with the contentment of a job well done and a moment shared. He could never look at a tortoise the same way after that. 

***

He doesn’t remember the exact date when Crowley comes to him with a broken wing, but it was quite early on in the days of their Arrangement, once they’d both started to call London home but before the fire. He knew that Crowley wouldn’t have come to him like this earlier, when their relationship was entirely built on mutual experiences and physicality, but some fragile bonds of trust have sprung up between them in the last few years.

He didn’t ask too many questions, and Crowley never gave him any answers. He knew that there had been nothing going on from his side, so Crowley had either been foolish or he had been punished… he found he didn’t actually want to know which. Crowley hadn’t said anything at all to start with, just stood there on his doorstep, a forlorn and broken thing with his mouth quivering with pain and one wing trailing behind him.

He hadn’t seen an injury like that since the war, but some things were just instinctive. He pulled Crowley inside and settled him on his bed, then plunged his fingers into the downy feathers, deftly probing for the injury. It wasn’t as bad as it looked at first glance, one clean break. Crowley still cried out as he gently pushed the broken edges of the bones back into the right position, and Aziraphale could feel the muscles of his back tensing in an oddly familiar way. He splinted the injury quickly enough, but he kept his hands buried in the glossy black feathers for a long time. 

He knew, on some abstract level, that there was pleasure in the giving and receiving of pain, but he never truly understood until that night spent with Crowley writhing and whimpering underneath him, begging him not to stop.

***

They’d managed to find their crepes, in the end. It shouldn’t have possible to manage such a frivolous thing in a city swept up in a revolution, but somehow they’d stumbled across a tiny restaurant that could cater to their desires. It had made Aziraphale happy, at least. 

He’d thought it had, anyway, until the angel manhandled him into an alley and held him there. There was no real force behind it, just the weight of the angel’s body pushing him back against a wall. It would have been easy to twist away from it, but he didn’t and then Aziraphale kissed him, a brief press of lips that was neither hesitant nor demanding. 

“I think I owe you one, for that,” he muttered.

Crowley just had time to wonder to himself that they were acknowledging this was a good thing then, whatever it was between them, before Aziraphale kissed him more insistently. He fumbled with Crowley’s shirt, then underneath it, his cool fingers a pleasant shock on Crowley’s skin. 

He had just enough presence of mind to snap his fingers and catch them out of time. If he’d been asked he would’ve said he’d done it just to prevent anyone from catching them  _ in flagrante delicto _ , and it was nothing at all to do with creating a moment with only the two of them in it. 

Aziraphale took full advantage and quickly had him laid bare, working him over first with skilful fingers and then with his mouth, which was warm and soft and irresistible. Crowley moaned as he settled into a rhythm that could only lead to one conclusion, until he pulled away and left Crowley thrusting on empty air, not once but over and over again. Perhaps he could have kept doing it forever in the little space that Crowley had carved out for two of them, a thought that simultaneously delighted and appalled him, and he was never entirely sure if it was this thought or some whim of Aziraphale’s that tipped him over the edge at last. 

***

He hadn’t believed Crowley when he’d told him that he’d picked that specific look so they’d attract less attention. Crowley, with auburn curls cascading down his back and a dress that left little to the imagination while simultaneously demanding quite a lot of imagination to picture the body that might be underneath is, seemed to be all about attracting attention. For his part, he’d made his usual effort to blend in, and was now feeling mildly ridiculous in his bowler hat and bow tie.

He often wondered about Crowley’s comfort in taking liberties with the body he’d been issued. He could make changes of his own, of course, but there was always something lacking, he could never really commit in the way that Crowley seemed to. If he was entirely honest, his might not be exactly the body he’d pick, given a free choice, but after a few thousand years he supposed he was fully accustomed to it. 

He hadn’t realised that Crowley planned to kiss him quite so thoroughly, in full view on their usual bench in St. James’s Park. He pulled away quite quickly, but everyone seemed to still be engrossed in their usual business, whether it was nannies bringing their small charges to feed the ducks or nervous ‘cultural attaches’ come to trade away state secrets. 

Almost without thinking, he reached out to curl a strand of Crowley’s hair around his fingers. It led him down another path of speculation, if he’d been the one to have flowing red hair down to there and dresses up to here, would he still have found himself playing the misanthropic bookseller? His thoughts started to prickle uncomfortably with vague recollections of exactly what it was that a redhead with a flaming sword might be doing, until Crowley banished thoughts of any kind by kissing him again. 

He let the kiss go on longer this time, but still pulled away. They still seemed to be going largely unnoticed, just one nanny tutting vaguely in their direction. Stupid, really, but Crowley had been absolutely right that they attracted less attention than he would have in his usual guise.

“I’m not sure we should be doing this here. It’s not exactly in keeping with, you know, the role.” 

Crowley smiled at him. “You are joking, right? There’s a long and storied history of spies using seduction to get information out of each other.”

This sent him into another long and uncomfortable thought spiral, for the very first time he wondered if Crowley was actually reporting on him, on this, if he was just another asset. At times he probably did tell Crowley more than he probably should, but that was because they’d become allies of a sort, not because Crowley did that thing with his tongue sometimes.

Then Crowley did that thing with his tongue and rendered him temporarily incapable of any thinking at all. This time he was the one to break off and actually get up and walk away, hips swaying in the way that only someone who’d spent years living without hips could master, leaving Aziraphale to go back to his imagination. It took him an embarrassingly long time to realise that Crowley had slipped a hotel room key into his pocket at some point during their encounter, with a note that just read  _ Mustn’t scandalise the ducks _ .

***

Crowley experienced all kinds of regret when he made his way to see Aziraphale after his first fateful mission to Tadfield, most of them expected but not the pangs he felt for their physical relationship. The reminders were everywhere as he looked around the bookshop, lazy afternoons spent entwined on the sofa in the back, swift, hard quickies up against the counter (he occasionally wondered if their frantic fucking had popped open the cash drawer of the temperamental old till more often than Aziraphale had deliberately opened it to make a sale)... never, ever against the bookshelves though. Some things were sacrosanct. It was a mercy, really, that as they’d slowly drunk themselves towards oblivion they’d only ended up talking about dolphins, not anything else, especially not his sudden desperate sense that time was suddenly and abruptly running out.

They still found their moments, of course, in the intervening years. There were plenty of scandalous rumours flying around the Dowling household when Warlock was young, but as he got older time was flying by until it was more about moments being missed, until that last terrible week when it seemed, over and over, that everything was finally coming to an end. It wasn’t until the two of them were sitting together at the bus stop, drunk once again on defiance and a couple of bottles of California red that they’d liberated from the air force base, that Crowley dared to dream that they might have time once again, spooling out in front of them as endlessly as it had done before.


End file.
